 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade and VCE. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE TVs, live coverage from EMC World 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon. So we always talk a lot about storage here at EMC World and cloud has really come into the mix a lot. One of the things I've really liked this year is we've been talking about the third platform, modern applications, cloud native pieces. We're actually talking a lot about some of the applications that are going on. And for this next hour, we're really going to dig in what we call the Big Data Solutions Group. Last year at EMC World, my first guest of the week was John Cardente, Distinguished Engineer and Corporate CTO with EMC. Joining me again, thank you, John. And Aiden O'Brien's going to be on to join and talk to those. And we're digging in with some of the partnerships. So on this segment, Wade Ault, of course, easiest names are sometimes the one we trip over. As we said, you put that right in my head. SPPs of Global Channels and Market Strategy with SunGuard. Very long partnership with EMC at SunGuard. Thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure, thank you. All right, so Wade, I'm familiar with SunGuard, but for those in our audience that might not be as much, just tell us, what is SunGuard's business today and what your role there? So SunGuard availability services, we build IT infrastructure services, both on the production and the recovery side, building solutions that meet customers' needs almost immediately. We've seen a very strong evolution towards point services to business outcomes. Our customers are now expecting us to provide both the production and the recovery. They see that as one as IT services and that's what SunGuard availability does. All right, great. So yeah, I remember years of working with SunGuard on the various replication solutions that EMC offered. The SunGuard was always some of the early ones to help with the deployments of that, so I'm not surprised to see you guys involved in big data. Talk a little bit about how you got involved in big data. Is that what brought you to this activity and what specifically you work with EMC on? Yeah, so big data, we see our customers grappling with big data on how to leverage the new tools that are out there, the agility and the scalability of those tools. They have a lot of internal and external pressure to answer questions about their business and so they're coming to SunGuard as they do with any of the solutions and really what they expect from SunGuard is two things, what we deliver and how we deliver it. They expect secure, scalable, available, resilient, IT infrastructure platforms that can grow as their businesses grow. Sometimes they don't know where it's going to grow and they expect us to be right there with them and providing the flexibility which also leads to the how. They expect us to be flexible with them, grow as they grow and changes their business changes sometimes when they don't need to. From a big data standpoint, what we see with our customers is they don't know exactly how they're going to use it yet. They know that they need to embrace big data. They see the value. Our buyer, the CIO, sees it as a chance to be more relevant to the business. It's a way for them to provide competitive differentiation to the business. All right, so John, last year when we talked, we were talking about the Federation solutions. Of course, matured a lot in the last year I look at the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and there's this new term, the data lake. I don't think we had that term last year when we did the solution. Can you tee up for us, what is a data lake? Why is it important? Right, so the concept of the data lake that we're developing is something that combines applications, analytics, and data all together. Our philosophy is that if you just attack one of those different dimensions, you're not solving the problem and enabling people to get insight from their data. And so we're building, we're taking our existing technologies that are capable of plugging into big data environments and we're extending them and enhancing them with Federation technologies to build basically a platform and an infrastructure so that folks can take that and solve a lot of the complexity of integrating these different technologies together to build an environment quickly with reliability and security and everything else. So the idea is to take a lot of the hard work it takes to assemble this stuff together and enable someone else to build on top of it to build an application. It's really important for us. Yeah, so Wade, how much of what John just talked about is reality, you guys actually stood this up. Can you walk us through your understanding of the data lake and what your process was to sharpen that up? We've actually been working with EMC before data lake was formed. We had a customer that had an immediate need. We had to stand up an environment in a matter of days, proof of concept and we were able to do that with EMC. There are three things that we see customers valuing when it comes to big data speed. It's got to be put up very quickly, almost immediately to a business outcome complexity. It needs to be simplified into a single delivery framework and that's where the data lakes provides us. And then number three, it has to be focused on the business outcomes. The big data solution almost immediately has to be to a business outcome. By having this integrated solution, we're able to focus on our customer on building the use cases instead of building the infrastructure. The opportunity we worked on together, we resolutioned that solution 17 times and it was all based on the differences in the use cases. We know something like this Federation, we won't have to go through that. We can just focus on the use cases instead of focusing on tweaking infrastructure. So one of the biggest challenges in this space is, modernizing applications isn't easy. Are you working with Pivotal Labs on that? Do you engage them on it? How do you help the customer with developing that new application? They're absolutely, we see our customers that have a broad range of needs. They have some legacy, they have some mainframe even and they expect Sungar to be able to manage all of it in a very simplified way. Our customers expect visibility and control even if they're not actually managing the day to day. Okay, so do you help with writing that new application or what's the involvement? No, we focus more on the management of the application. We work with partners to develop, not only the APIs, but also the application itself. So, I'm curious, what's your thought on the EMC Federation in general? Do you have much visibility in the other pieces or what does it mean to you? Is it helping you do your job? I think it goes back to, it immediately gives us speed on having an integrated platform, pre-configured integrated platform ready to go. What that allows us to do is work with the customer on what their outcomes are. Before, we had to work on each of those infrastructure components. We had to work on configuring them and integrating them. Now that that's already integrated there, we can spend more time on working with the customer on outcome. We get it to market faster, they get business results faster. John, you want to comment on the update on the Federation? Yeah, I know. The Federation is a very powerful thing and the Federated Business Adelape is a great example of it because we across the Federation have all the technologies that are necessary to bring to bear on an analytics problem, build an analytics environment, but we recognize that the customer wants choice. This isn't an attempt to lock them into a Federation play. So, if a customer prefers to use one of the other Hadoop distributions, that is something that we can do within this infrastructure. And so, that might not be possible if we were one monolithic company. By being separate entities, we have more degrees of freedom to tailor our offerings to match what the customers need to achieve their goal. And so, it really is a very powerful thing. So, Walt, talk a little bit about just kind of how customers are in the adoption of this. What percentage of customers that Sunguards engage with, do you think, are ready for this big data conversation? Or are ready to really dig into it? I think they're all thinking about it. They're all asking questions. I think we're in the front stages of adoption of big data. They all have different opinions on it and they're all looking to try it out. The complexity is something that is an intimidator tool. So, I think this integrated solution enables them to try and migrate to using big data more. But we absolutely see it. Our customers come to us with very complex IT solutions and needs and big data obviously is one of them. Yeah, so, one of the biggest challenges has been that put together the whole stack has been a little bit complex. How do you think we're doing at making this solution simpler and faster to deploy? I mean, that was one of the whole things on big data. I remember, gosh, four or five years ago, we wrote a piece and said that two years to deploy a solution, you can't have it anymore. It's got to be there in months. That's right. So, are we doing that? Are we getting this done in weeks to months, not a huge time? And I don't know if you're a baseball guy, but we're in the first inning here. We're in the third inning. We're deep into really making big data easier to consider. I agree with you. I think it's all about the speed. And I think that's what the data lakes allows us to do. I think it's all about getting that out there very quickly and anchoring it to a business outcome. I think one of the things that's in the value, you asked a question about value, we worked with EMC before the data lakes was an established product. We saw the pain of integrating it together. So now seeing it after seeing it with the component piece parts that can be leveraged in different ways for the customer, that's exactly what we're looking for. That's what we need. And that's exactly why we approached it from that perspective of doing everything, analytics, data and applications, because just solving that one piece doesn't fully address the complexity. So to put more color on it, our data lake platformer has a service catalog of all the analytics applications and infrastructure that one would need to assemble things. And so what we're building allows someone to say, I need an environment with a little bit of Hadoop, a little bit of Mongo, a little bit of this, click, click, click, boom, we instantiate it. And it's all on enterprise quality hardware and storage. And so it really is simplifying that complexity through the curated service catalog, the enterprise quality products that come into bear and it really addresses that flexibility. Yeah, and I think the time frame's important because sometimes our customers, they don't have a choice in a window of opportunity. The case in point was one of the opportunities we worked with EMC on. So I think that time to get it up and established, focused on an anchored business outcome is very, very important. So, Wade, it's been a transformational time in IT. Can you talk just to kind of high level, what's the vision, where's SunGuard going? Is it dramatically changing the business with things like cloud and big data? How your business is run? Absolutely, I think we see IT needing to take a more differentiated role in serving the business. We also see IT having a lot more complexity and their hybrid and heterogeneous environments. And what they're looking for from SunGuard is to be able to manage that complexity and provide that management in a single delivery framework to our customers. Yeah, I mean, it's a tough balance because on the one hand, look, it'd be great if I just had an easy button that I could put things in, but you also need to make money. So there's that pivot and their transformation. How's EMC doing? You know, it's not like they're sitting here or listening to what we're saying. But, you know, what more do you want from EMC? It sounds like that you were instrumental in helping them put together the big data lake piece. You know, what's on your wish list, you know, kind of from the industry overhaul and maybe EMC specifically? I think we're working really well with EMC. I think the creativity around solutioning is exactly where our customers are asking us to focus our efforts. And I think the product portfolio is very important, but if you can't leverage that product portfolio to meet a specific business outcome, then I don't think we're going to have a very successful partnership or business, for that matter, with the way IT is evolving. So I think the partnership we have with EMC and the technical creativity on solutions has been very, very productive. I think we're working with EMC on more provider solutions and making the solution that EMC has more helpful from a provider perspective. So wait, I want to give you the final word here. If you've been to EMC World before, you know, or if you haven't, you know, what brings you to EMC World? You've been here for a few days, you know, what's the value to you to come to an event like this? Wow. Just very impressed with the technological creativity. The open ear listening to what we have to say and the true interest in solving the problems that we have, that's been overwhelming. I've been to many events like this, but I really do enjoy EMC World because it does feel like there's a listening ear interested in helping us solve problems. And I think that's one of the reasons why we've had such a successful partnership for so many years. All right, so John, I'm actually going to get you the last word. Customers want to find out more about the Big Data Lake solution. Do you guys have a microsite or website? EMC.com slash Big Data, it's all there. Excellent, nice and simple, EMC.com slash Big Data. We're on siliconangle.tv for the live video wikibon.com slash cloud where wikibon.com slash Big Data will get you all the research that we have there. We'll be right back with lots more interviews after this quick break. Thanks for watching.